fix(siteruntime): self-healed and newly-enabled instances now get their DCL connections (register row 85)

An Instance Actor started by a self-heal came up with NO DCL connection actors,
so every tag it subscribed was answered "Unknown connection: <name>" by the DCL
manager indefinitely. Proven live 2026-08-16 by the row-78 close-out probe: the
sweep correctly started the replication-seeded instances, then every subscribe
failed for 6+ min until a second pair restart.

Root cause is narrower than the register assumed. A DCL connection actor is
never created from data_connection_definitions -- that table has no production
reader at all (GetAllDataConnectionDefinitionsAsync is called only by a test).
It exists only as a side effect of starting an instance, from the Connections
map inside that instance's own flattened config, via EnsureDclConnections.

That ensure was the CALLER's job and only two of the four callers made it:

  CreateInstanceActorBatch (boot)   ensured  OK
  ApplyDeployment (deploy)          ensured  OK
  StartStoredInstance               MISSING  <- row-67 ensure-started + row-78 sweep
  HandleEnableResult                MISSING  <- enabling a disabled instance

The two misses are the two paths added after the original pair -- the signature
of a convention living at call sites instead of in the funnel.

It was never replication-specific: the boot load reads only ENABLED configs, so
a node booting with an instance disabled never creates its connections either,
and enabling it afterwards hit the identical dead end on an ordinary
unreplicated site.

Fix: EnsureDclConnections moves into CreateInstanceActor, already documented as
the single Instance Actor creation funnel (it is where the running revision is
stamped for the same reason), and the two caller-side calls are removed. Placed
before the already-exists guard so the two paths that already called it keep
their exact previous semantics. No new message, option or DCL change -- it
reuses EnsureDclConnection's existing per-name hash guard, so steady state is
silent. Structural rather than another guard: a fifth start path cannot forget.

Deliberately NOT done, with rationale in the memo: a sweep pass over
data_connection_definitions. It would not have fixed row 85 (that table is empty
on a site that has only ever received instance deploys), and re-hashing from it
would fight the deploy path over the same per-name hash slot, recreating
connection actors and dropping live subscriptions on a loop. Two residual
sibling gaps (connection-only artifact deploy replicating to a peer that never
adopts it, and the mirror-image removal case) are recorded in the memo and the
component docs as open, not silently skipped.

Tests: SelfHealCreatesDclConnectionTests, 7 tests asserting on the
CreateConnectionCommand messages sent to a recording DCL stand-in. Verified
fail-before against a behavioral revert (call removed from the funnel, restored
at the two original sites): 4 fail / 3 pass, the 3 being steady-state silence
plus two refactor guards that must pass on both sides.

Docs: sweep design memo gains section 7; Component-SiteRuntime,
Component-DataConnectionLayer, docs/components/SiteRuntime and
docs/components/DataConnectionLayer updated (the deploy-flow step ordering in
docs/components/SiteRuntime was stale as written).
This commit is contained in:
Joseph Doherty
2026-08-17 03:48:01 -04:00
parent 07220bc655
commit 8f2c2813ea
9 changed files with 641 additions and 49 deletions
@@ -108,6 +108,8 @@ flowchart TD
>
> Guards, all shared with the row-67 handler: a **disabled** instance is never started; the sweep **defers to any deploy pipeline that owns the instance** (compile warm in flight, predecessor still terminating, deployment awaiting its persistence/init join) so it can never interleave with a real redeploy; it is **inert until boot-time Instance Actor creation has finished**, so a tick between staggered batches does not "heal" instances the boot load is about to create; it makes **one repair attempt per (instance, revision) pair**, which is what stops a periodic self-heal becoming a restart loop for an actor that dies during init or a stored config the compile gate rejects (a rejection leaves the running instance untouched — the gate returns before anything is stopped); and reads never overlap. A sweep that finds nothing is **completely silent**. A repair emits the same Warning `deployment` site-event pattern as row 67, naming the trigger (`deployment-manager sweep self-heal`) so it is distinguishable from a startup-reconcile heal, and a stale-revision restart names **both** revisions; a rejected restart adds an Error event. The synthetic redeploy replies to the singleton itself rather than to `NoSender`, because dead letters are a monitored site health metric.
> **Starting an Instance Actor also creates its DCL connections — the ensure lives in the creation funnel, not at call sites (register row 85)**: a DCL connection actor is **never** created from the `data_connection_definitions` table (nothing in production reads it). It exists only as a side effect of starting an instance, built from the `Connections` map inside that instance's **own flattened config** via `EnsureDclConnections` — plus the separate system-wide artifact-deploy path. That ensure used to be each *caller's* responsibility, and only two of the four callers made it (the boot-time staggered batch and `ApplyDeployment`). The two that did not were **`StartStoredInstance`** — the path shared by the row-67 ensure-started handler and the row-78 sweep — and **`HandleEnableResult`**. Both therefore produced a running instance whose every tag subscribe was answered `Unknown connection: <name>` by the DCL manager, indefinitely, because nothing else on the node would ever create that connection actor. Proven live 2026-08-16: a replication-seeded node's instances were correctly started by the sweep and then failed every subscribe for 6+ minutes until a second pair restart let the boot load create the connections. **It was never replication-specific** — the boot-time load reads only *enabled* configs, so a node that boots with an instance disabled never creates its connections either, and enabling it afterwards hit the identical dead end on an ordinary unreplicated site. `EnsureDclConnections` now sits at the top of **`CreateInstanceActor`**, already the single Instance Actor creation funnel (it is where the running revision is stamped for the same reason), so all four paths get it and a fifth cannot forget. It is placed *before* the already-exists guard so the two paths that already called it keep their exact previous semantics, and it stays silent in steady state because `EnsureDclConnection` is hash-guarded on the last config pushed per connection name. Deliberately **not** done: a sweep pass over `data_connection_definitions` — it would not have fixed row 85 (that table is empty on a site that has only ever received instance deploys), and re-hashing from it would fight the deploy path over the same per-name hash slot, recreating connection actors and dropping live subscriptions on a loop. See `docs/plans/2026-08-15-instance-sweep-self-heal-design.md` §7.
> **Per-instance compilation during staggered startup — CLOSED (WP3.1)**: this was a deferred optimization (P6) affecting failover time-to-recover; each Instance Actor Roslyn-compiled its own scripts inside its own start, serialising a site's whole recovery behind compilation. Each staggered startup batch now runs a **pre-warm step**: before the batch's Instance Actors are created, the Deployment Manager compiles that batch's distinct script bodies and trigger expressions on a background task and pipes `BatchCompileWarmed` back, so every `PreStart` compile is a cache hit. Instance Actor start still calls the compilation service — it remains the correctness backstop — but in every warmed path those calls are memoised lookups. Cost: one extra message per batch.
> **The Roslyn `ScriptOptions` are process-static, and must stay that way**: the reference set backing every site-side compile is built once per process, never per compile. `ScriptOptions.WithReferences(Assembly[])` resolves each assembly through `MetadataReference.CreateFromFile`, which does **not** cache — each call mints a fresh `MetadataReference` owning an `AssemblyMetadata` → `PEReader` → `NativeHeapMemoryBlock`, an unmanaged copy of the assembly metadata that nothing disposes. Building the options per compile leaks native memory permanently: no GC reclaims it, and it is invisible to gcdump and to the managed allocation counters, so the node's working set grows without the GC heap growing. This was a live defect (a Site node at 2,885 MB working set with 150 MB of live GC heap, ~2,469 MB of it on the default process heap across ~6,700 undisposed `AssemblyMetadata` instances). Note this is orthogonal to the compile cache above — the cache dedupes *identical* script bodies, so it bounds nothing when the bodies differ. (It no longer clears wholesale on overflow: WP3.1 replaced that latency cliff with approximate-LRU batch eviction, see **Compile cache eviction** below.) Pinned by a reference-equality regression test rather than by watching memory.